Category: WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT

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How Formbird Ensures Your Business Wisdom Never Retires

Holding onto Corporate Knowledge: The Power of Operational Works and Asset Management Solutions

In the age of rapid employee turnover, one of the most significant challenges businesses face is the loss of corporate knowledge. When seasoned employees leave, they take with them not just skills but the invaluable tacit knowledge of business processes, often cultivated over decades. Enter solutions like Formbird FLEET and Formbird CLARITY. These aren’t just software solutions; they’re the guardians of institutional wisdom.

Formbird FLEET: Keeping the Wheels Turning with Knowledge

Consider the intricacies of fleet management. Every organisation has its unique set of rules, from vehicle maintenance schedules to driver protocols. Formbird FLEET allows organisations to encode the business’s practices and business rules into the software. 

For instance, a shire council with a fleet of trucks will have specific rules regarding vehicle maintenance frequency based on the odometer, the type of cargo carried or the terrain the vehicles have to access. Using Formbird FLEET, the council can embed rules, ensuring planned maintenance is prompted at the predefined intervals set by the business rules. 

For example, in a coastal shire council where trucks transporting quarried rocks to reinforce sea walls will be inspected for rust every 5000 kilometres due to its use near the ocean, another vehicle transporting park maintenance plant will only need to be inspected for rust every 10,000 kilometres. These unique business rules are part of the system. Even if the fleet manager retires, the system ensures that the next manager, or even a new hire, adheres to these established standards, preserving the organisation’s best practices.

Formbird CLARITY: A Clear Vision for Water Utilities Management

Water utilities present a different set of challenges. As seen in the example of the Bundaberg Regional Council, the transition from paper to digital was revolutionary. Before Formbird CLARITY, a leak in the water system was reported on paper, passed to a technician, fixed, and then recorded—often with delays and inefficiencies. The key business rule here? Rapid, efficient response to leaks to prevent wastage and ensure customer satisfaction.

Formbird CLARITY, embeds the entire process in the system. A digital workflow is triggered when anyone reports a leak; CLARITY assigns a technician, provides them with historical data on the site, and enables real-time updates from the field. The ‘paper trail’ becomes a ‘digital pathway’, streamlining operations. 

What’s more, the corporate knowledge, the specifics of how the team historically managed these issues, gets stored and can be accessed by new employees. They ensure their knowledge doesn’t go with them when a veteran employee retires.

The Future is Clear

The beauty of solutions like Formbird FLEET and Formbird CLARITY lies in their ability to streamline operations and capture and hold onto corporate knowledge. By embedding specific business rules, they preserve the organisation’s hard-earned wisdom. In an era where knowledge is power, these solutions ensure that organisations are efficient and satisfy customer needs.

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Navigating Change: Harnessing Technology for Business Continuity Amid High Staff Turnover

As the CEO and Founder of Formbird, I am acutely aware of how changing times and demographic shifts can profoundly impact organisations. The COVID-19 pandemic and the fast-approaching wave of Baby Boomer retirements have fundamentally disrupted career timelines and workforce dynamics in regional councils across Australia.

Demographic Shifts and High Staff Turnover

In typical times, we’d expect a turnover rate of around 15% in rural councils. However, we are not in regular times. The pandemic and demographic shifts, particularly the trend of older workers, including many Baby Boomers, opting for early retirement, have seen turnover rates surpass 25 per cent in some councils, such as Moyne Shire Council in Victoria. It’s worth noting that when one partner retires, it’s common for the other partner to follow suit, adding to the churn.

This high turnover rate presents significant challenges in maintaining the quality of services, work efficiency, and retention of institutional knowledge. While factors like compensation and work culture play a role, it’s clear that the major driving forces behind this trend are primarily external and reflects broader societal changes.

How do we navigate these challenges and ensure business continuity in the interim? This is where innovative solutions like workforce management solutions come into play. These systems are critical for maintaining corporate knowledge, as they store essential data about a council’s operations, schedules, and maintenance. New employees can quickly access this information, reducing training time and ensuring operational knowledge is retained within the organisation.

Moreover, these systems can reinforce existing policies and procedures, which is vital for a council to ensure service delivery to ratepayers. By providing a consistent and reliable source of operational guidelines, workforce management solutions can ensure that service delivery quality and consistency remain unaffected even with a high turnover rate.

At Formbird, leveraging technology is critical to creating a more consistent and efficient work environment. By automating tasks and providing reliable data, workforce management solutions management systems can help new employees adapt quickly, ensuring council services run smoothly despite staff changes.

Beyond Technology: Enhancing Employee Satisfaction and Retention

However, technology alone is not the answer. Improving communication channels with employees, encouraging regular feedback, and offering flexible working hours and telecommuting options can also significantly increase employee satisfaction and retention.

As we navigate these tumultuous times, we must view these challenges as opportunities for growth and improvement. By implementing strategic changes and harnessing the power of technology, regional councils can ensure effective operations, continuity of services, and sustainable development.
Change can be challenging but can also catalyse innovation and progress. We can turn these challenges into opportunities, creating a more resilient and effective public service.

Mark Hosking

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Australia’s Formbird to develop rail inspection platform for Saudi Arabia Rail

Australian low-code development platform Formbird has engaged with one of the world’s largest engineering consulting firms, Ricardo, to build a versatile asset audit application for Saudi Arabia Rail (SAR).  

In Ricardo’s words, their rail division is a global rail consultancy that provides technical expertise, assurance, and specialist engineering services to help clients navigate the industry’s operational, commercial, and regulatory demands.

The contract is a milestone in Formbird’s progress. At the same time, it’s not their first venture outside of Australia; they are already delivering their fleet information management solution to the Department of Public Works and Highways in the Philipines. The project will be their first in the Middle East. 

Mark Hosking, CEO, and Founder of Formbird – “The project is an extension of an existing solution that we developed for rail asset inspection in Victoria. The Saudi rail system (SAR) is crucial for Suadi Arabian transportation infrastructure. The project will involve implementing a solution on our low-code platform to document the inspection of tens of thousands of assets belonging to the railway.”

Hosking continues, “Formbird’s low-code platform has an advantage over traditional inspection solutions and simple forms applications because we can build a sophisticated business process around inspection. 

Formbird’s platform leverages low code allowing development to move quickly. Changes to the application can occur rapidly to meet the needs of a dynamic project.”

Ricardo Rail is taking the lead, drawing on its history of innovation in rail. The project will see several capabilities of the Formbirds solution taken full advantage of. Particularly the offline capacities of the mobile application. 

We look forward to finding out how Formbird’s asset audit application performs when it goes live in one of the world’s harshest environments of the Arabian Peninsula. 

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Predictive operations solutions – Software that sees the future

The best software solutions are invisible: their fit is hand-in-glove. The software becomes part of the “every day”.

Your operational software should not add friction to what you do. It should be value-adding and incentivise people to enter data and share information to the point where that process becomes automatic.

Great software automates many mundane back-office processes and moves an organisation from focusing on data management to data-supported decision making and communication.

Managers should spend their time making good decisions and increasing productivity, not managing data.

Great software should also connect directly with people on the ground, engage them and distribute the workload.

As opposed to someone having to report something and someone else having to translate their message and enter the data that creates a message to someone else instructing them to complete a task.

For example, when there is a problem with a vehicle and someone in the field has to say,

“I have a problem with my vehicle. Here are the details of it and here’s the photo. Can you email it to the mechanic to ask them what I should do?”

Great operations solutions do not waste your time and effort

The vehicle operator communicates directly with the mechanic when the maintenance request is lodged in the software, rather than sent to admin and the workshop supervisor and then to the mechanic.

With great software, the mechanic — once notified — can directly request more information and schedule the repair in accordance with the urgency.

Software that communicates within an organisation can also communicate beyond the organisation; Automated messages are sent to external stakeholders when a resident’s request has been completed. A simple SMS notification sent to residents that the rubbish truck has been delayed could save hundreds of unnecessary communications with residents.

Great software solutions become a team’s single source of truth. It tells everybody in the group what has happened, what is happening and what might happen.
And great software is needed to help managers meet some of the significant challenges looming on the horizon:

  • Integrating technology into the business process
  • Transforming data management into communication
  • Continuous improvement

Great operational software will transform an organisation’s information into communication.

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Enterprise-ready App in 6 weeks – A low-code victory

Bundaberg Regional Council works and asset management app 

We talked to Sean Askew, the Network Planning Engineer (Water Services) at Bundaberg Regional Council. Our mission: To discover just how fast he and Formbird got up and running with their new “works management app”. We find out how they are now reaping the benefits of their quick build solution. And how their “works app” continues to bring business value through flexibility, with the Formbird low-code development platform. 

Tipping the scales at over six thousand square kilometres, Bundaberg Regional Council is one of the largest councils in Queensland. Three hundred and sixty kilometres north of Brisbane, the region is a booming hub of agriculture and industry and a popular tourism/lifestyle destination. The regional council employs close to nine hundred employees. 

Getting started with Formbird

After an intensive six weeks, Formbird were live with the first phase of an asset and works management digitisation project for the regional council, starting with the water and sewer department. The reticulation team are now rolling Formbird’s works management out across all of the Water Services delivery teams including; Treatment, Mechanical and Electrical. As well as being extended outside Water Services to Trade Services.

Because Bundaberg Regional Council had already implemented an asset management system, they had a good idea of what they wanted. They also knew what they didn’t want. 

Mark Hosking, Formbird CEO, said, “Local government has traditionally been a challenging problem for a broad-based works and asset management app to solve.”

“A local council has a unique process in every corner of the organisation; you could say a council represents 50 small businesses.”

“When we replace an existing system as we did in Bundaberg, it is always surprising how often we see a solution designed by one area and then implemented in another. For example, designed by accounts and used in operations. The fit is never quite right.”

Because the Bundaberg Regional Council team had already implemented asset management software, they were knowledgeable; they had the experience; they were battle-hardened or maybe scarred. Their expertise gave Formbird a great base to build on. 

“Formbird built a strong working relationship with Sean Askew and Sharyn Williamson, first starting with water and now moving into trade services and other areas of the business.” CEO Mark Hosking said. 

The Formbird Advantage

Bundaberg Regional Council Water Services wanted a solution that would meet their needs in a hurry for today and be flexible into the future. 

Looking at what was available, they soon discovered that most solutions on the market were “set in stone”. They required organisations adhere to a massive flowchart with everything already mapped out. Maybe this would work in a perfect world. 

“We needed to digitise our field staff and our business, we know the current state of play, and we know things could grow and change.”

Sean Askew

An organisation’s needs won’t match how they operate when a specification is signed off twelve months prior.

Sean knew that the potential for cost blowouts of a twelve-month development cycle would be high; if circumstances changed in that time, the end solution would be useless. 

Sean Askew asked Formbird, “What can we do now? What could deliver business value from day one?”  

He continued, “if you asked any other organisation to digitise your field operations teams in six weeks, they’re going to laugh at you. There’s no way that’s physically possible … we needed something on the ground, working, it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles, but we need to get it done.”

“In six weeks, we had the guys starting to use it. Was it the end product? No. There were many things that we could add, but the core value was there. After six weeks, we could demonstrate that some of our teams had gone digital.”

Compliance Assessment: Rapid development saves the day

Bundaberg Regional Council Water Services had an upcoming hazardous chemical compliance assessment. An inspector came to see all their safety data sheets. The information was in a legacy system that needed to be made current.  

Bundaberg Regional Council had to get an updated list of the chemicals. They had to respond to the request within the week. 

They quickly made a form in Formbird and pushed it out to all the teams. The field teams went out and captured the detail of every chemical they had stored, including adding photos and then generated the report.

They can now use this new tool to inspect and build a process to keep the hazardous materials register up to date.  

Bundaberg Regional Council was able to turn this around in under a week, getting the data sheets up to date and having a new tool to do it. 

The information captured was a crucial step in meeting the recommendations by the auditors. 

Thanks to Sean Askew, the Network Planning Engineer (Water Services) at Bundaberg Regional Council, for his assistance in preparing this article. We look forward to hearing more from Sean soon.

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Digital reports take the guesswork out of hand-over

Low-code development platform Formbird gets organisations big and small automated 

One of Formbird’s smallest customer operates a plastics factory with 15 staff. They wanted an application to manage the hand over between shifts.

You may know Formbird as the low-code development platform behind enterprise-grade solutions such as the works management application for the water utilities “Formbird CLARITY” or the transport industry-aligned fleet management app “Formbird FLEET“. Did you know Formbird is equally at home in a small business environment?

United Plastics, operates a plastics factory with 15 staff. They wanted an application to manage the hand over between shifts. Their facility has 20 machines which all need to have regular checks for safety and performance.

We started with some staff training to go through the basics. Once introduced, they caught on quickly using the documentation to answer any questions.

They were ready to go and fully operational once the son-in-law built half a dozen forms.

When the new shift starts, they get a detailed report of any breakages or failures at change over, including photographs for documentation.

Before getting Formbird up and running, the handover was ad-hoc with a mixture of spreadsheets and email.

Now they have a straightforward control mechanism that enforces safety and quality processes. And they get this at a monthly cost in the hundreds, not the thousands, that would typically be associated with this type of custom process management app.

The best bit is that this hand over app is now ready to go as a part of any Formbird App.

We see this as one of Formbird’s great strengths and a significant achievement. A small scale operation can now quickly get all the advantages of Formbird, in the same way, as a large enterprise. The fact that Formbird can operate at any scale is a testament to the capability of the technology.

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Low-code development tipped to dominate the enterprise

Blog by Mark Hosking, CEO and Expert Developer at Formbird

Low-code development wasn’t always part of the enterprise landscape. First, there was code: computer programs are written in languages like Fortran, Cobol, Basic and, in more recent years, languages like python and C++. 

Even before that there was assembler: a very basic programming tool tied closely to the instruction set of a particular processor. I started developing software on the Z80 processor in the nineteen-eighties.

I’ve been involved in building enterprise software solutions, throughout my career. And always the cost of development, the cost of delivery has been incredibly high, and there have been many failures.

With traditional programming, whatever an application needs to do, whatever input it accepts from users and how it presents information to users has to be specified line-by-line. It’s a costly and time-consuming process that requires programming skills and almost invariably requires several coding cycles as programmers translate what they understand to be the requirements into code, present the results to users and then make modifications based on feedback received.

A better way has long been sought and led to the emergence of fourth-generation programming languages and rapid application development tools. The former embedded some of the required functions required into code that could then be used and adapted to specific tasks. The latter is a methodology that brings customers and users into the development process so that what emerges is closer to final requirements. It has something in common with Agile development methodologies.

Examples of rapid development application tools are Oracle Forms Progress, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access. All had limited capability and scalability.

I started developing a mobile product in 2000 using dot.net based on an Oracle SQL database for water utilities. One of our greatest challenges was determining what data model represented. As soon as someone wanted to introduce a change to their business, the model would collapse.

We decided that we really needed a new construct, and that really was the starting point for Formbird back in 2017, using low-code development technology. And low-code really is the future of software development.

The power of low-code

Low-code goes beyond programming languages and rapid application development tools. It enables an application developer to create the interfaces to the application using a graphical user interface and to specify the required logic and functionality, which is then implemented, transparent to the developer, by the system calling up pre-written code.

Note that low-code development is not designed to remove the need for developer skills, but it does enable less skilled developers to produce apps, and greatly accelerates the development process.

Forrester Research is credited with coming up with the term ‘low-code, in a 2014 report New Development Platforms Emerge For Customer-Facing Applications It proclaimed: “Low-code platforms are rising as an alternative for developing customer-facing apps. Initially targeted at speeding all projects, these platforms are finding traction in the age of the customers’ heightened priority for customer experience software.”

A $US13.8b market by 2021

Since then low-code has demonstrated its power and has been enthusiastically embraced for a wide range of applications. Gartner, in February 2021, forecasts the worldwide low-code development technologies market to grow 23 percent in 2021, reaching a value of $US13.8 billion.  Gartner also estimates that, by 2023, over 50 percent of medium to large enterprises will have adopted a low-code application platform as one of their strategic application platforms.

Gartner research vice president Fabrizio Biscotti said a confluence of digital disruptions, hyperautomation and the rise of composable business had led to an influx of tools and rising demand.

He went to say: “Globally, most large organisations will have adopted multiple low-code tools in some form by year-end 2021. In the longer term, as companies embrace the tenets of a composable enterprise, they will turn to low-code technologies that support application innovation and integration.”

Of that $US13.8b, Gartner estimates low-code application platforms (LCAP) will account for $US5.75b, a 66 percent increase from 2019 ($US3.47b).

Low-code versus no-code

Those figures also include ‘no-code’ development platforms, which, logic might suggest, would further streamline the production of applications, but, according to Gartner: “no-code is not a sufficient criterion for tasks like citizen development, as many complex tooling configuration tasks are no-code but still require specialist skills.”

No-code is a powerful tool for enabling anyone with no skill to develop simple applications, but like any powerful tool, misused or in the wrong hands, it can be dangerous. Likely consequences of inappropriate use of no-code tools are shadow IT, poor security, integration problems, excessive use of resources.

The distinction is far from clear and there is little consensus. Gartner, in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, said no-code vendors were not included, but some of the vendors evaluated described their offerings as being no-code development platforms. 

However, there does seem to be some consensus on the definitions, even if individual platforms might not seem to fit the label attached to them.

Low-code development to take the lead

Low-code is designed for people with software development skills, to make them more efficient and speed application development. No-code is for non-IT people who want very specific, and relatively simple applications. So it will have a place, but clearly, it is unrealistic to expect it fulfil the majority of application development requirements.

Low-code, on the other hand, looks set to dominate software development. Gartner estimates that by 2024 65 percent of application development activity will be low-code.

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Greater Western Water saves with workforce management upgrade

Formbird CLARITY – Industry aligned workforce management app drives efficiency and compliance

Australian low-code software platform Formbird has implemented cost-saving productivity enhancements to its industry-aligned workforce management solution; Formbird CLARITY.

For Greater Western Water in Victoria, the measures will reduce administrative workload equivalent to at least one full-time position. The upgrade project is ongoing and expects to result in savings equal to three full-time positions when completed.

The project aims to improve; productivity, compliance, and safety and take the guesswork out of managing proactive and reactive works on Greater Western Water’s network.

Formbird’s initial implementation of the Formbird CLARITY for Greater Western Water made use of legacy systems including manual entry of critical information by call takers and works administrators. To access the data operators had to source GIS systems and multiple SharePoint spreadsheets.

For example, using manual lookup in the GIS was not an ideal or timely way to locate dialysis patients, requiring essential services.

As you could imagine, in the past, the system was somewhat haphazard. To identify addresses, where multiple disruptions had occurred, admin staff had to “consult” the “hot shutoff block” spreadsheet. This spreadsheet had to be manually maintained and provided only necessary information such as text-based street addresses.

Formbird’s Formbird CLARITY provides critical information required at each step in Greater Western Water’s workflow. A fault report or planned work requirement creates a case. The system determines the streets affected by the network shutoff via the GIS system integrated into Formbird CLARITY. The solution then details related assets, properties and critical sites.

Formbird CLARITY – Critical locations are identified according to their type

This screenshot shows the properties impacted on a map. Critical locations are identified according to their type. Further information such as essential customers, are highlighted and included links to their detailed record.

Formbird CLARITY – properties have experienced multiple supply disruption

This screenshot shows a case where highlighted properties have experienced multiple supply disruptions exceeding the Guaranteed Service Level (GSL), for example, less than three interruptions in a rolling 12-month period.

Formbird CLARITY – Warning highlighted with prominent banners

Call takers and field crews can now identify the potential impact on a map. When the action is assigned to a team, the impact area is highlighted with prominent banners where important locations and special requirements need to be observed.

After completing the work, the exact customer’s impacts are recorded if any Guaranteed Service Level rebates are required. By keeping these records in the system, future cases can be supported by updated and more accurate customer impact information.

The latest additions to this industry-aligned app also include providing bulk actions such as invoice load, supervisor review creation and closure of no-cost cases, and a new Works Administrator report to support cases’ identification.

We will be interested to see the future developments of Formbird CLARITY and how they continue to improve efficiency, safety and compliance.

Get in contact with Formbird today to see how your organisation can benefit from efficiency gains with your workforce management.

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